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She snogged Helen Baxendale, had sex with
Leonardo DiCaprio and has been compared to a 'mad,
frantic, dark cloud'. But the stormiest weather in Laura
Fraser's career was the blizzard of cocaine that
threatened to end it. Where's a knight in shining armour
when you need one?
Words Peter Ross
For a small woman, Laura Fraser is doing her best to seem
even smaller. The Scottish actress one drooling male
journalist recently described, in a torrent of hyphens
and hormones, as a 'raven-haired, pale-skinned,
green-eyed, full-lipped, firm-figured, sweat-dappled
beauty' isn't around today. The young woman sitting
opposite me looks tired, tearful and fearful, hiding away
inside a baggy shirt, baggier jeans and brickie boots.
Most men who interview Fraser write as if they want to
bed her. I want to put her to bed with a hot water bottle
and a nice cup of tea.
We're in the sort of plush Glasgow hotel where waiters
scuttle along behind you sweeping up your dropped
aitches. Fraser is supposed to be promoting her new film,
A Knight's Tale, a medieval romp for the
MTV generation where jousting is done to a Queen
soundtrack. But she isn't really the sort to give a movie
the hard sell. Besides, she's too busy chain-smoking
Marlboro Lights and mixing a mineral water cocktail. It's
half sparkling, half still, a bit like her.
The world -- or at least that portion of the cinema-going
public which enjoys pictures about Glasgow's gang culture
-- first saw Fraser in Gillies MacKinnon's 1996 film Small
Faces. She played Joanne, girlfriend of Malky
Johnson, leader of feared Gorbals gang, the Tongs. Small
Faces was an important film. Along with Trainspotting,
it launched the careers of a new generation of Scottish
actors who would become known, in a cringeworthy term, as
the Jockpack. They included Kevin McKidd, Joe McFadden,
Steven Duffy and Fraser herself. From Small Faces,
she went on to snog Helen Baxendale in The
Investigator, have it off with Leonardo DiCaprio
in The Man In The Iron Mask (his first
words instead of, 'Hello, Laura' were, 'What kind of
orgasm do you usually have?') and co-star with Isabella
Rossellini in Left Luggage. She moved to
London, moved in with Anna Friel, prepared to become the
huge star every magazine had been predicting she would
and ... was rather shocked when it didn't happen.
She has made 12 films in the last four years, and very
few of them have been any good. It's okay to say this; if
you asked her, she'd agree. Look, let's try it: Laura,
what went wrong?
'Yeah, well, I kind of just ... wasn't ... really
thinking ... ' She coughs, p-a-u-s-e-s, stumbles on. 'I
was just kind of going, 'Yeah! A job? I'll do that, I'll
do that, I'll do that'. And that gives you a weird CV.
But with A Knight's Tale, I really liked
the part, and I did work to make it the way I wanted. It
actually mattered to me, whereas before things didn't
really matter. I didn't care what anyone thought or even
what I thought. And now I do.'
So why the change of heart? 'Eh ...' She lets out a
nervous laugh, the first of many. 'My lifestyle's
changed.'
The reason Fraser is being so hesitant and avoiding
specifics like landmines is that 'my lifestyle's changed'
is code for 'I don't take cocaine any more.' She stopped
using the drug more than two years ago, a decision which
marks a clear dividing line in her mind between the
person she was then and who she is now. Her conversation
is peppered with references to 'my old self', 'the old
me', and it's clear that she regards the coked-up Laura
Fraser as beneath contempt.
'I was going mad,' she says, suddenly speaking clearly
and quickly, chopping out her reply into short, potent
lines. 'Just started going insane. Completely paranoid.
Not knowing what was going on. Not able to concentrate,
not able to communicate. I felt so alienated from
existence and just didn't know what was happening.'
Did she have trouble accepting that she had a problem?
'Oh no, I knew I was in a state. I absolutely knew. But
it was fun for such a long time. Then it wasn't fun.' She
adopts the cartoon voice of a finger-waggling public
information film. 'And then it wasn't fun any more.'
Does she miss anything about those days?
'Em, yeah, I suppose. In a stupid way, I get quite
nostalgic about thinking that nothing would really go
wrong and I could just keep going, keep going, keep
going. Then you realise that, well, you could die.'
But Fraser admits that she didn't stop taking cocaine
just because it was bad for her health. 'I think the main
thing [that made me stop] at that time would have been
immediate things like producers complaining. That would
have entered the very shallow level that I was living on.
That really started it. I realised that I couldn't do
really great work when I was off my face.'
So she quit and promptly did some great work in Titus,
a radical reworking of Shakespeare's bloodiest play Titus
Andronicus. Fraser thinks that the director Julie Taymor
may have cast her as Lavinia, who is raped and has her
tongue and hands severed, because she picked up on how
upset she was at the time. Taymor told the actress that
she reminded her of 'a mad, frantic, dark cloud'. Fraser
abandoned herself to the role, identifying too strongly
with the character, feeling her way through every scene
and failing to put any insulating distance between
herself and the part. She ended up in quite a state,
mentally and physically exhausted.
'I didn't know that I was that fearful of life,' she
recalls. 'I realised that I was really as scared and as
vulnerable as anyone else. I realised my limits, what I
couldn't do and what to accept I couldn't do. I think
maybe I grew up a little on that shoot.'
At least her efforts paid off. Titus is
an uneven film, which often elevates style over content,
but Fraser plays Lavinia with an anguish that's painful
to watch. It's a powerful, unforgettable performance,
easily the best thing she has ever done. Not that she'll
thank you for saying so. The first time she saw
Titus, at the premiere in Los Angeles, she hated
the film and her role in it. 'I was just really shocked
and humiliated,' she remembers with screwed-up eyes. 'I
was so depressed.'
It's incredible; she doesn't seem to be have any
self-esteem at all. Just listen to her talking about
doing the rounds of casting directors in Los Angeles --
'I don't look as good as American actresses, so I
sometimes think it's a bit pointless' or explaining why
she wanted to be in A Knight's Tale --
'The director was really gentle and humble and I thought
he'd be very nice to me'. This is so unlike the
interviews she is known for, the ones where she'd slosh
back white wine, go into the details of losing her
virginity (she was five foot two, he was six foot five,
they were both 16) and say really horrible things about
Sean Connery.
'My life is just so completely different from the way it
was a few years ago,' she admits. 'I don't see the same
people. I don't do the same things.' When the cocaine
went, so did the circle of friends who she took it with.
'No big loss,' she laughs.
Since Titus, she has worked much less.
She's been chilling out, listening to Beth Orton, going
to the pictures, reading a lot. She seems to regret not
having gone to university -- she left school at 16 and
went straight into acting, first with Scottish Youth
Theatre, followed by an unhappy stint at RSAMD -- and is
currently working her way through the classics. Her
favourite book is Women Who Run With The Wolves by
Clarissa Estes, which uses archetypes from myths and
fairy tales to argue that women need to be 'wild' to
achieve 'wholeness'.
Fraser read it right after Titus as a
kind of self-help book. She loves fairy tales and is
holding out for her own happy ending. 'I never had a plan
but I did assume when I was 20, 21, that each stage I got
to, [my career] would only go further. I didn't realise
that it would go back. And that was quite a tough one to
take. Like going from having money and working all the
time to having no money. I was like, this isn't the way
it's supposed to be. So I don't have expectations any
more. I just hope. '
The irony is that now she cares about her work, she's
finding it harder to come by. She's waiting for the good
parts instead of whatever lucrative rubbish comes along
(key example: as a spotty teenage raver in Kevin
And Perry Go Large). It's not easy, though.
Especially for someone as thin skinned as Fraser. She
auditioned for Steven Spielberg's Minority Report
and, while waiting for a cab, overheard the casting agent
moaning on the phone: 'We haven't seen anyone who's
half-way decent. We've gotta get Samantha Morton over
here -- she's the only one for this part!'
Now, Fraser worries that she has sold out, that by being
a bit nicer to people and a little more careful with what
she tells journalists, she has somehow become nothing
more than another cog in the Hollywood spin machine.
That's rubbish, of course. If anything, the sell-out was
making films for the sake of her bank balance rather than
because she wanted to be good at her job.
Since filming A Knight's Tale -- which
is a pretty good popcorn movie, by the way -- she hasn't
worked much, and has been bored to tears, but you get the
impression she likes herself a bit more.
'There were things that I could have done that were just
rubbish,' she says. 'I would have done them before. I'd
have gone, 'Oh, it's money, I'll do it'. But I just
couldn't any more. I won't have any money, but at least
I'll have some sense of integrity. It's to do with how
you feel about yourself.'
And another thing: Fraser is hardly a guarded
interviewee. Most actors would rather be beaten around
the head with an Oscar than talk to journalists about
drugs, but being honest is an important part of who she
is.
The only time she clams up is when I ask about her
boyfriend Paul Bettany. The star of Gangster No.
1 is arguably Britain's fastest rising young
actor and he completely runs away with A Knight's
Tale in which he plays Geoffrey Chaucer a
compulsive gambler. He makes his -- ahem -- entrance in
the nude, immediately stealing the movie from its
ostensible lead Heath Ledger.
Fraser and Bettany met when they both auditioned for
parts in an American comedy. Rejected, they went out for
a consoling lunch and things developed from there. When
asked, he refuses to even confirm that they are together.
She doesn't go that far, but remains reticent. 'I don't
want to talk about it,' she says. 'I just hate it when
people talk about things like that. It's just naff and
embarrassing. Then you break up and you might be in a
mess but you still have to answer questions.'
By the time you read this, Fraser will be in Ireland,
working on an American independent film called
Coney Island Baby -- sweetly, she sings the Lou
Reed song from which it takes its name. She plays a
pregnant girl training to become a mechanic, and the
clunky boots she's wearing today are being broken in for
the shoot. She seems happier by the end of the interview,
cheerfully talking about her recent birthday, which she
celebrated with a barbecue in Bettany's back garden. It
was 'very responsible, all very proper' and her friends
couldn't believe that the girl who once described herself
as a 'radgeling' was the same one ushering them into the
house after dark so as not to annoy the neighbours.
Fraser, for her part, has certainly come through the
darknesses of three years ago. Okay, she seems a little
damaged, rather unsure of herself and of what the future
holds, but she's certainly older, wiser and on course to
make the kind of films that someone with her talent
should be.
'I'm 26 now and I'm not going to make any more mistakes
ever,' she says, solemnly. And then she grins the sort of
devilish grin that could knock a knight from his horse at
50 paces. 'Yeah, sure ...'u
A Knight's Tale is released on August
31.
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